Yaiba’s Weekly Backhand: Dead Snow
}} was the twenty-fifth blog post in the Yaiba’s Weekly Backhand blog hosted on the Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z website. It was originally posted March 19, 2014. Transcript College co-eds in an isolated mountain cabin who are forced to fend off Nazi zombies? Sounds like my kind of vacation. Dead Snow is a horror movie that pokes fun at horror movies, but doesn’t rub your face in pseudo-fourth-wall bullshit the entire time. It starts off with four guys and three girls on their way to a remote cabin in the mountains of Norway: Erland, Roy, Martin, Vegard, Hanna, Liv, and Chris. The group reaches the cabin, blissfully unaware of what viewers already know: the eighth and final member of their circle, Vegard’s girlfriend Sara, will never meet them there. Sara decided to cross-country ski through the mountains instead of driving with everyone else, and the movie’s opening sequence is a lone woman being chased through snowy wilderness and mauled by a zombie in a Nazi uniform. Later that night, a traveler scares the shit out of the group when he appears at their door and interrupts their drinking games. He wants shelter from the cold, and proceeds to lecture them in true old stodgy geezer fashion about being careful not to ‘awaken’ any evils in the mountains. Apparently, 300 Nazis were once stationed nearby, and they were particularly brutal, gold-greedy bastards. They murdered tons of innocent people, so the town revolted and launched a sneak attack one night to get their revenge. The leader of the Nazi camp, Herzog, managed to escape into the mountains with a number of his men, and they were never found. Roy laughs off the warning and they send the grizzled old dude on his way after he’s had a smoke and a cup of coffee (what’s with this free-range organic crap everyone’s obsessed with? It’s no wonder it tasted terrible). Unfortunately for the traveler, zombies attack him that night in his little orange tent. For all his talk about being prepared, he doesn’t even land a single shot with his gun before a zombie slits his throat and feasts on him. Elders everywhere are the same–they spout shit, but when push comes to shove, they can’t do anything useful. Back at the cabin, Vegard decides to search for Sara. He takes the group’s single snowmobile and leaves the other six with his car keys, even though he’s the only one who actually knows how to get back to the cars. No one else is worried, but Vegard’s loses his shit when he finds the bloody remains of the traveler. In his panic, he falls into a cavern where he finds Sara’s decapitated head displayed like a trophy amidst a Nazi flag and weapons stash. Vegard escapes the cavern and fights off a few Nazi zombies, gets bitten on the neck, and winds up dangling off of a cliff, only to crawl back up using another zombie’s intestines as rope. (I prefer using zombie parts for something that packs a little more punch.) He stitches himself up and lets his rage about Sara continue to fuel him, mounting a Nazi machine gun on top of his snowmobile before heading back to the cabin. That’s what I’m talking about! Meanwhile, back at the cabin, Erland discovers a box of stolen treasure hidden beneath the floor. The friends in the cabin party it up, and then Chris surprises Erland while he’s in the outhouse (talk about doing the dirty…). Erland heads back into the cabin first, but Chris gets cornered in the outhouse by a zombie and never makes it back. Then, the onslaught begins! A handful of Nazi zombies attempt to break into the cabin, and Erland is dragged out and eaten. Hanna, Liv, Martin, and Roy decide to split up, with the two girls making a break to try and get back to the cars, and the guys being decoys to draw the zombies away. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work, and Liv falls to some zombies, setting off a grenade as her last action to take them out with her, showing more balls than the guys in their group. Hanna toughs it out and manages to stay alive, even surviving being buried in an avalanche she caused when a zombie cornered her on a cliff. The guys, on the other hand, are colossal idiots. They manage to set fire to the cabin AND screw up a call for help, but luck out when they run into the cabin shed and find a chainsaw and some heavy tools to use as weapons. Hanna returns to the cabin, but doesn’t announce herself like a moron, so it’s her own fault that Martin turns around and kills her before realizing she wasn’t a zombie. Martin and Roy fend off zombies until Vegard arrives, but Herzog appears with even more zombies,and Vegard winds up down for the count. Martin gets bitten and self-amputates his arm like a moron, but still manages to out-live Roy by digging the box of treasure out of the charred cabin remains to turn over to the zombies. Apparently Nazi zombies are as greedy as dragons, even though they’ll never be able to spend their wealth. Martin escapes, but gets screwed after he’s finally made it into a car since Hanna secretly snuck a gold coin into his pocket earlier. Herzog appears beside the car to collect the gold, and Martin’s reaction time sucks. Guess that was Hanna’s revenge for being cut down after managing to fight off zombies and dig her way out of an avalanche. The fight scenes are actually decent, there’s just the right amount of blood, there’s no happy ending, the two badasses die anyway, and in the end the Nazi zombies win. I guess that makes it a pretty solid horror flick. I definitely can’t help but wonder how these Nazi zombies stack up against the Eastern European variety I’ve been making mincemeat out of lately. External Links [http://www.yaibangz.com/index.php/blog/2014/03/19/yaibas-weekly-backhand-dead-snow/ ] Category:Yaiba’s Weekly Backhand